The first FBA Pro Tour event in Finland was a huge success in no small part to extremely professional and organized people who ran the event. Timo “Timppa” Nyyssönen and his crew were top notch. You can tell Timppa has watched a few well organized flair competitions in his day as the timing of the event was spot on as qualifiers finished within 2 minutes of the projected time!! Well done Timppa!!

Helsinki was pretty much what I expected… friendly, clean, cool, with just a bit of rain. What I did not expect was the sun to stay up until almost midnight!! Then it peaks its head out again sometime around 5am again. Crazy days in Finland with 19+ hours of sunshine. Granted, that is just the summer time as winter is the opposite.

The venue for this event was world class. Club Royal Onnela is the largest club in Helsinki and it has 9 themed bars/rooms to suite anyone’s tastes in music and fun. While no room was perfect for a flair comp, they organizers did a fantastic job of figuring out where to put the stage. If it wasn’t for this pesky support column at the corner of the stage, you know the one holding the building up, it would have been perfect. The competitors had a practice room, food, drinks, and VIP access to the entire club.

On to the comp.

For me one of the highlights of the competition itself was a Doimo pulling off a no drops no spills round in qualifiers. That is the first time I have ever seen any Doimo achieve this. On top of that, it was a superior round that earned him 1st place in qualifying. Even though Dario already won the qualifiers, I felt the need to give him a 1000 point bonus for his achievement of a clean round.

Overall we had a pretty solid qualifying session with low drops most of the finalists. The qualifying results were as follows:

You can view the entire qualifying field and full score breakdown PDF file via the link above.

We rolled into finals fresh and relaxed with Gianluigi Bosco setting the bar with a very solid round for everyone to try to beat. At the end of the day, only 4 people could bring enough flair to beat him as Bosco finished 5th overall.

Vyacheslav “Slava” Gazukin from Russia showed some very fresh and technical stuff, but unfortunately dropped many of the big moves hurting his points overall and earning him 8th place.

Alex Searle from UK brings a much needed new style to the flair world, not only with this “body catches” and “body rolls” but also his energy and how his mind thinks about flair. I expect we will see Alex move up the ranks as soon as he can figure out how to take all his cool new flair ideas and put it into a solid routine or package. Good things to come from Alex for sure, but this comp 7th is all he could manage.

Following Alex was the Italian Marco Canova (who also has a new training DVD out). Canova’s finals routine was not executed as nicely as his qualifiers, even with only 5 drops, he was just not as solid and struggled a bit more than in qualifiers. His performance was good, but not good enough on this day to catch Gianluigi Bosco who at this point was still in first place.

Bosco’s grasp on the lead was about to start slipping and as expected the last 4 competitors strolled right by with some seriously sick moves. The first to stroll by Gianluigi was Marek Posluszny from Poland. Marek has really been putting out some solid flair for the past few years. His finals routine did not disappoint as it was filled with slick sequences and very difficult moves. Overall it was a phenomenal routine even if it was speckled with 11 drops that would finally award him the 3rd place honors.

Following Marek was the current UK and Roadhouse World Champion Tom Dyer. Dyer’s routine had everything you would expect from Tom, difficulty, smoothness, originality, and all the rest. After the routine however, the 9 drops just hurt him to much in raw flair. They really affected his routine bringing his scores down. Even after all that, it was still enough to secure 2nd place overall.

Qualifying second place was Tomek Malek from Poland. Tomek came to Finland off the back of several straight wins around Europe, which is no surprise based on what we have seen from him this past year. Tomek came out strong with his guns blazing, but after the dust settled he suffered from 13 drops and they were big drops that really hurt him. His flair was sick sick sick, but after the deductions he could only gather up 4th place.

This leaves the 1st place qualifier, the Italian, from Germany, hailing from Las Vegas Nevada… Dario Doimo who came off a no drop no spill round, stepped it up for finals and threw some serious junk. Even after 8 drops, it was still enough to keep that top spot. Dario came to Finland and showed everyone why he is a candidate to be the best in the world. It is obvious that he has been working hard to clean his routines up with an emphasis on technical execution and landing his moves… it seem to be paying off. Congratulations Dario!!

I would like to once again thank the extremely professional team from the Club Royal Onnela lead by Timppa Nyyssönen. First class event!! I am looking forward to my next trip to Finland and assisting in bringing this event to the next level, a world championship is brewing in Finland my friends!